How to Create a 1-Page SaaS Marketing Plan

Omer (00:13.920)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode I talk to Alan Dibb, a serial entrepreneur, marketer and author of the book the One Page Marketing Plan.
Get new customers, make more money and stand out from the crowd.
To build a successful SaaS business, you need to stop doing random marketing and instead follow a reliable plan for rapid business growth.
But creating a marketing plan can often be a difficult and time consuming task for early stage SaaS founders.
Alan wrote the book with direct response marketing in mind.
However, in this interview I talked to him about how to take the best of his one page marketing plan concept and make it work for SaaS businesses.
So in this episode you'll learn a simple step by step process through for creating your own SaaS marketing plan.
That's literally one page.
Alan starts with the big idea and then walks us through each stage of creating a marketing plan.
And he makes the entire process simple and fast.
So if you've been struggling to create a great marketing plan for your SaaS business or want to go back and refresh your marketing, then this episode is for you.
I hope you enjoy it.
Okay, Alan, welcome to the show.

Allan Dib (01:52.010)
Hey Omar, pleasure to be on the show.

Omer (01:54.090)
Awesome.
So can we just start by you maybe just telling us a little bit about yourself, like what's your background and you know, what were you doing before you got here and kind of what do you currently do?

Allan Dib (02:05.930)
Sure.
So look, I'll give you a bit of a bit of a background.
I started my business life as a dead broke IT geek.
I, you know, I was good at what I, the technical part of what I was doing, but I had really very little clue about business or marketing or anything like that.
My, my background was as an IT and telecoms engineer.
So.
So yeah, look, I started business because I thought, hey, I'm good at what I do.
Why don't I start at a business and stop working for this idiot boss.
And then I became an idiot boss.
So I struggled for many years to really understand business and marketing and that took me on a decade long journey to really learning and understanding it.
And from there I managed to grow my first business which was a managed service provider, an IT managed service provider.
And we grew it to be a national business and I exited that and then after that I started a voice over IP provider.
We grew from zero to four years later.
Being in the top 100 fastest growing companies in the country, which in Australia, and I exited that as well.
And so now I'm really helping other business owners with their marketing challenges and helping them grow their businesses.

Omer (03:24.290)
Awesome.
So tell me a little bit about like, so you run a company called Success Wise.
So what do you do there?

Allan Dib (03:33.810)
So we basically do marketing and business education and we do that through, through the book, which is the one page marketing plan.
We do that through a membership online community.
I also one on one coaching and we do group coaching as well.
So different delivery methods depending on how intensive someone wants to work with us.
But yeah, we're basically here to help entrepreneurs because so much of what's at universities or at schools and all of that is really focused on helping people become employees.
They're not focused on helping people become entrepreneurs.
So I think there's a real gap in that business and marketing education space and that's what we aim to fill.

Omer (04:19.020)
Yeah.
And so the one page marketing plan, the book is the, the reason that I found you and invited you onto the show.
And we're going to spend this interview talking about that and you're going to teach our audience about the one page marketing plan and how they can start to use that in their own business.
But before we get onto that, like, just tell me about like how did you come up with this book?
Like where did the idea come from and how did you end up writing this book?

Allan Dib (04:53.820)
Yeah, it's a great question.
So I was working with clients, helping them with their marketing, helping them with their business.
And one of the first things that I wanted them to do was to write a marketing plan because that gives us the roadmap of what we're going to do.
It creates clarity so that we're not distracted by bright shiny objects and the latest SEO trick and the latest this and that trick.
I wanted my clients to put together a marketing plan and more often than not they just wouldn't do it because it was too difficult, too long, too expensive, too hard, all of that sort of stuff.
And so I came up with a process that I thought would be quick and easy for them to come up with a very comprehensive direct response marketing plan that they could use in their business that was practical.
And this was the one page marketing plan method.
And I used that method for quite a while before I ever released the book.
I found it to be very successful.
It had a very high take up rate, or to use a medical term, a high compliance rate.
So a lot of the people got really good results with it.
And I thought I really must get this out to a wider audience.
And that's what I did in the book.

Omer (06:05.180)
So tell us a little bit more about the one page marketing plan.
We're going to go into a little bit more detail about kind of, you know, what it is and what it looks like and so on, but just kind of, you know, one of the things that I really liked about it was that it's really.
Maybe it's just the way my mind works, but it's really nice to be able to take a concept like marketing and how you've got to sort of apply it to your business and get it done on one page, right?

Allan Dib (06:38.110)
Yep.

Omer (06:38.550)
And it doesn't necessarily mean that everything you do is going to be on that one page or all the details are going to be there, but it's a great way of making sure that you are covering the bases and you are thinking about the most important aspects of marketing your business.
And so maybe you can just kind of tell us a little bit about, like what, what, what benefits can people expect from taking something like the one page marketing plan and applying that to their business?
Yep.

Allan Dib (07:11.500)
So the main benefit is just to get a lot of clarity around your marketing, a lot of clarity around what you need to do next.
Like I said, I'm not from a marketing or creative background or any of that sort of stuff.
I'm from an engineering background and I'm someone who thinks very systematically.
I want a plan, I want a system, I want a method to follow.
And that's what I felt was lacking in a lot of marketing books.
A lot of them were very conceptual or very theoretical.
And so this was what I wanted to change with my book.
So I've basically taken someone through the entire customer journey, starting from someone doesn't know that you exist, right down to their arriving fan, and they're someone who will refer you new business.
And I take people through the entire journey and it's split up in three major phases, which is the before phase, the during phase, and the after phase.
And each of those phases have subsections to them as well.
So it's a very systematic way of, okay, how do we start from scratch?
Because that's something that I was really missing.
I learned marketing the difficult and expensive way through trial and error, through just piecemeal learning, through mentors and all of this, and was a wonderful journey, but it was very difficult, was very long, very expensive.
And so I was hoping that I could create something that would shortcut the journey for A lot of people.
And that, and that's, that's, that's the one page.

Omer (08:40.959)
Yeah.
Awesome.
Okay, great.
So you talked about the three stages.
The before, the during, and the after.
So maybe we can kind of dive into each one of these three phases and talk about kind of each component there.

Allan Dib (08:59.980)
For sure, for sure.
So the before phase is before anyone knows that you exist.
So it's, and it's where you're wanting to get out to the world, create some buzz where you essentially, at the end of this phase, someone will put their hand up and say, you know, I'm interested in what you've got to offer.
You know, so they, they, at the end of this phase, they'll know who you are, they know you exist, and they'll indicate some interest.
So, and this phase is broken into three major sections.
So one is identifying your ideal target market.
The second is your messaging to that ideal target market, and the third is the media that you use to reach that target market.
So in the case of like a SaaS product or something, for example, let's say you've written a SaaS product for the real estate industry, right.
So your target market might be real estate agents.
And then we might drill into that further.
You might say, okay, a real estate agent that's got a team of four people or more and that's doing a million dollars revenue or more.
Right.
So we're starting to really hone in on that target market and really understand who our customer is.
Then we talk about messaging.
So you might think about what are the things that are keeping up my target market awake at night?
What are the things they're worrying about at 3am in the morning?
And you want to really tap into that with your messaging.
So for our real estate says example, it might be, you know, the paperwork is just killing me, right.
So I'm spent, I'm spend all day with showing people through properties or real estate and then I'm spending all night on this paperwork.
So I really need something to streamline that paperwork trail.
And then the media is usually the most expensive part of your marketing and that's how you're actually going to reach your target market.
Is it going to be through PPC, pay per click advertising, Google AdWords, Facebook ads, LinkedIn, print, whatever, trade shows, all of that sort of stuff.
So you need to think, where does your target market hang out and be there and reach them in that manner.

Omer (11:13.010)
Got it.
Okay.
Now in terms of my target market, you know, for somebody building a SaaS business, the idea of creating an ideal customer profile is, you know, one component of that.
And it's.
It's really.
I guess it's the same thing.
It's just getting clear about who your target customer is.
And so you can just do a better job at refining all the other things we're going to talk about later.
Because if you're vague about that, then it's going to be really hard to do all the other things.

Allan Dib (11:42.770)
It is going to be very, very hard.
And that's why this is the absolute critical first step.
Because the mistake a lot of people make, they say, my software or my product or my service, it's for everyone.
It's awesome.
And that may be so, you know, it may be that anyone could use your product or service, but.
And I'm not saying that you necessarily turn away business that's not in your target market, but when it comes to your marketing, you have a finite amount of time, you have a finite amount of dollars, and you really want to target that very tightly.

Omer (12:13.430)
Yeah.
And then in terms of the message to my target market, how is.
How is someone supposed to figure that out?
I mean, you talked about understanding some of the pains, and so that may come from.
Okay, you may understand you may be your own customer in some way, so you understand, you know, you might have been a realtor, so you understand some of the pains you had to deal with, or you may have gone out and talked to some customers, but you're gonna.
You're gonna potentially end up with a long list of things.
Is there kind of a way that people can think about?
Like, how do you kind of simplify that messaging?
What's the best way to organize that information?

Allan Dib (12:59.040)
That's a great question.
So there's.
There's you.
So, like, you indicated you may have been a part of that target market.
So, like, for example, I've been a business owner who hasn't had a clue about marketing.
So I absolutely know some of the hopes, fears, dreams of those business owners, and I can speak to that very well because I've been a part of that target market.
Now, if you're targeting a target market that you haven't been a part of, that you haven't experienced it yourself, you really need to go deep into some of the research.
And, you know, you can do research at a superficial level through interviews.
You can troll forums and things like that where you can see what are the things that people are asking.
And, you know, you can join Facebook groups, forums, and you will.
You'll start to see very, very clearly what are Some of the top major things on the mind of this target market.
The other thing I would say is to do some testing.
So you want to start testing various offers and messages and you know, people in the, in the SaaS space will be very adept at doing that.
You know, split testing different headlines, split testing different offers, split testing different packages and pricing and all of that sort of thing.
So you really want to start getting data from the actual target market themselves through surveys and ad hoc means.
You also want the data to speak for itself.
You want to be able to see, okay, I put up these two offers and a version A is getting far more traction than version B.
And then you might drill into some of that.
So there's going to be a research piece.
Some of it is going to be a little bit more of an art than a science.
Others, things like surveys can be a little bit more scientific and you can get some really good data there.
And in surveys I always like to ask an open ended question as well because you'll be able to really capture some of the words of your target market.
So they may phrase things differently than you would and it's very important to capture their words to really understand.
So a realtor may phrase something completely differently than a software guy would.

Omer (15:07.490)
Yeah.
And it kind of strikes me that this, this doesn't have to be a one time process.
Like, it's not like you sit down and you got to fill in the nine boxes and that's what you stick to.
But it's almost like you could probably sit down and do the first version in less than an hour based.
This is the information that I have.
Let me get that down.
And then as you get more data, as you learn more, you can keep coming back and refining it and improving it.

Allan Dib (15:38.380)
Absolutely.
It's designed to be a living document, one that you can like pin up on your wall or have sitting on your desk or whatever.
The last thing I ever wanted was for it to be this big long document that you shove in the top drawer of your desk and you never sees the light of day again.
So you want this to be a living document and as you rightly said, fill it in with what you've got now and you can refine it over time.
Because it's a single page, it's a single canvas, very, very easy to update, to redo, to add another segment or another product line.

Omer (16:10.190)
And then the third piece of that you said was the media I will use to reach my target market.
And so that could be, you mentioned AdWords or PPC it could be doing content marketing, it could be sending cold emails, you know, if you're doing outbound.
So whatever it is, it's kind of getting, figuring that out.
And again, it's not necessarily that the one page marketing plan is going to kind of give you all the answers for that because you're probably going to have to base that on where your target customers are or where you think they're spending their time.

Allan Dib (16:45.750)
Exactly.

Omer (16:46.470)
Testing different marketing channels until you figure out what works for you.
But again, it gives you kind of a good place to start.

Allan Dib (16:57.750)
That's exactly right.
And you should have more than one marketing channel as well, because, you know, we've all seen things like the Google slap, you know, Facebook, you know, costs going up and up to boost, boost to reach audiences and all of that sort of thing.
So you don't want to be single source dependent.
So to use an engineering term, you don't, you don't want a single point of failure.
You know what I mean?

Omer (17:21.390)
Yeah.
Okay, so to recap, we talked about the before phase when you're trying to get the attention of your prospects.
And then the three parts to that were identifying your target market, my message to my target market, and then the media I'll use to reach my target market.
And then the next phase we go into you called the during phase.
Tell us about that.

Allan Dib (17:46.680)
So the during phase is all about taking someone from raising their hand and saying, look, I'm vaguely interested in what you've got to offer.
So they may, for example, opt in or do a free trial or something like that and really taking them through the process of, you know, capturing their details, nurturing them, and then converting them to being a paying customer.
So when they paid their first dollar, they become a paying customer and they've completed the during phase.
So that's what it's all about.
This is about taking someone who's said, look, hey, I'm interested in what you do and then taking them through that journey of becoming a paying customer.

Omer (18:26.930)
Okay, great.
So let's again, let's go through each of your three boxes in here and talk about them.

Allan Dib (18:35.290)
Sure.
So lead capture is all about ensuring that we give some value upfront and get someone to opt in on our database.
Now with SaaS, it could be like a free trial or it could be a white paper or a free report or a video series or anything like that.
We don't want to lose prospects who are interested in buying, you know, tomorrow or the day after or in three months, six months, nine months, because everybody knows how to deal with prospects who are ready to buy right now, right?
You know, click, click the buy now button, go through the shopping cart, and you're a customer.
But very few people know how to really work well with prospects who are ready to buy in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days.
And really that makes up the vast majority of your prospect base, because statistics show us that roughly only about 3% of your addressable market are hot and heavy and ready to buy right now.
So if you're not capturing their details, you're going to be missing out on the next 7% who are kind of really interested, but not right now, and then the next 30%, which are really interested, but maybe are further down the buying cycle.
So if you're not capturing those leads and keeping in touch with them and giving them value and nurturing them, then you're going to lose the vast majority of your potential pipeline.
So if someone just goes to your homepage and they're one of the 3%, sure they'll click the buy now button and go through your buying cycle.
But you need a way of being able to capture the rest of the people who are maybe ready in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, a year from now, and take them through that journey.
And that kind of leads us naturally through to the next section, which is the lead nurturing system.
And so, as I mentioned, you want to keep in touch with someone and continually give them value and give them education, because all other things being equal, a highly educated customer is far better than a customer who's not educated.
And that's assuming you've got a good product, which I'm assuming everybody here does.
So, you know, if you've got a product that's harmful to your client base, then more education is probably not the way to go.
If you sell cigarettes or drugs or something like that, then you probably want them to be less educated.
But for the vast majority of business owners, we want our clients to be better educated.
We want them to know, you know, what, these, these major features are hugely superior to what else is offered on in the market and how they're going to help them and take them through that journey of how it's going to make their life better.
So that's really lead nurturing.
It's making the prospect really understand.
It's also positioning yourself as an expert and an educator, because an expert and educator has far higher positioning than just a salesperson.
So if we've done that, all right, the next section, which is sales conversion, just becomes infinitely easier.
And, you know, I'm of the view that if you've done all the phases properly prior to this, that this essentially just becomes order taking.
There's no convincing, there's no hard sell, there's no kind of pushy sales tactics and all of that.
Because if you have to resort to that, you've probably not, not done right the first few sections of your marketing.
You really want your marketing to do the education work and you really want your sales conversion to essentially be order taking.

Omer (22:12.710)
Give me an example of what a sales conversion strategy could look like.

Allan Dib (22:19.350)
Sure.
So really good sales strategy, conversion tactic, especially relevant to SaaS is try before you buy.
You know, it could be a 30 day trial, but more than that, you know, Everybody offers that 30 day trial, 14 day trial and all of that.
But more than that I would say is get your customer a result in advance.
So if they're the realtor and they're trialing the product because so often clients or potential clients prospects, they'll trial a product, they log in, they see the dashboard, it's full of a million buttons and options and things like that and their eyes glaze over, they click off and their trial ends in 14 days and they just cancel or don't enter their credit card details or whatever.
So it's, I think for a SaaS business it's super critical that within the trial period, if you offer trial period, that you get them a result.
So they signed up for some particular reason.
Right.
They didn't sign up just for fun.
The vast majority of cases they wanted a particular result.
So your onboarding strategy will be absolutely critical as a SaaS company to get your client a result.
I think.
And the other thing I would say is not hiding behind your website.
So more and more bringing out the human element.
And you know, as engineers that can kind of be a weird thing for us to do.
But really getting on things like video calls or chats on the website, that sort of thing.
So really helping the prospect through the onboarding journey and getting a result in advance, I think that is going to be a very critical conversion strategy for your, for your audience.

Omer (24:01.170)
Got it.
Okay, so a few questions, let's just want to work through those.
So my, the first step you talked about, or let's call it step four in the one page plan, my lead capture system.
So I think most people listening to this would be familiar with the idea of, okay, I capture an email address when somebody comes to my site and that could be for a free trial before some kind of email course or PDF or whatever.
And then my lead nurturing system would be about having some kind of autoresponder in place where I can send automated emails to these people, hopefully with a ton of valuable information, educational information that just nurtures those people, that gets them, you know, ready to get to that next stage.
Are there other ways that steps four and five could work?
Like for example, if someone is doing outbound sales and they're starting with cold email, let's say as an example, could that kind of, could that kind of process work with this, these steps here?

Allan Dib (25:28.310)
Absolutely, absolutely.
So this work.
So when you're doing things like cold email, that's I guess a hunting strategy.
You're going out and you're hunting, whereas the capturing of inbound leads, that's like a farming strategy.
And you need a good, good balance of both.
The other thing I would add as to how you can make this better, whether it's outbound or whether it's inbound, is segmentation.
So you want to, you want your message to be highly relevant to your audience.
So as an example, in my business I have three major segments.
I have people who are just startups, they're just starting out, they've got an idea or they've got a product or service and they're trying to get it out to the, to the world.
Then I've got business owners who are running with a running business.
It's been going for a while, but they want to level up and typically they're doing 1 million to 10 million in revenue.
And then I've got corporates that I deal with, where I deal with the executive team.
And you know, we work on marketing and we work on that sort of thing.
So the messaging to each of those target markets is completely different.
The things that they want are completely different.
The corporates, you know, want to please their board of directors, they want to show shareholders they're doing stuff.
Whereas the one to ten million dollar startups, the one to ten million dollar businesses, they just want to level up and get a result.
I'm typically working with the business owner.
They want to go from 2 million to 4 million or whatever else.
And the startups often they just want to validate an idea or they want to see if there is a market for something and they want to get to their first dollar in revenue.
So segmentation is very, very important.
And that goes back to again, your target market.
And within your main target market you can have segments.
So like I said, I've got three main segments in my business and very likely in a SaaS business, you'll have a few different segments.
You might have the enterprise clients who want to use your product.
Then you've got maybe the sole trader and then you've got maybe the business owner who's kind of already running.
And so tagging those in your CRM system with a particular tag so that you're sending stuff that's highly relevant to them.
And the reason you want to send something highly relevant to them is because the whole purpose of your marketing and advertising is for them to read it or see it and say, hey, that's for me.
Because the brain is just bombarded every day with so many messages.
It's a big filter.
So it looks for stuff that's irrelevant to discard.
Right.
So if your message is irrelevant or if your message is too general, your prospects brains will automatically discard it because the brain can't handle this much stimulation coming in.
So you need to do something where they will look at it or read it or watch it and say, hey, that's for me.

Omer (28:24.870)
Yeah, I like that.
And yeah, I mean, you just brought up another thought that I had from looking at this in terms of the nurturing.
When you started talking about nurturing, I was thinking about, okay, email autoresponder, but in many ways we can kind of be a little bit more creative and think about other ways to do that too.
So for example, nurturing could be you are you're using email, but it could be depending on the type of customers you deal with.
Maybe you're also reaching out to some of these people on social media or Twitter or LinkedIn or maybe you're sharing some content with them or liking something that they've done.
Which is another way I think of just kind of staying on the radar and hopefully getting some attention without just being annoying.
Right?

Allan Dib (29:15.580)
Absolutely.
And I would highly encourage your audience to even think of offline methods.
I mean, you know, you don't have to stay online and you know, something as simple as a handwritten note, literally no one does that.
Right.
So you would stand out a mile if you sent a handwritten note to someone who's currently started a trial and say, hey John, saw you signed up for the 14 day trial.
I'm really excited to have you on board.
All the best OMA kind of thing.
So you would stand out from all your SaaS competitors.
It's a pattern interrupt.
And you know, what does it cost to send someone a handwritten note?
You know, $2 maybe in postage.
So if you have a process around that with your team, that you know, someone signs up for a free trial, it takes them through an email lead nurturing system, then in your office sends them a handwritten note, you're going to stand out a mile from all of your competitors.

Omer (30:13.540)
Yeah, and your point about segmentation was a really good one because how you apply these steps would be different to the segment that you're thinking about.
So for example, if you are talking to, you know, maybe you're talking to a small medium enterprise, the product doesn't require a lot of onboarding.
You know, it's kind of pretty much self serve.
Your lead capture might be just something to get their email address.
Your nurturing could be the autoresponder and your sales conversion could be some kind of manual follow up, like a personal note or maybe getting them onto a demo and getting that closed.
Whereas if you're talking to an enterprise customer, maybe your lead capture is going to be getting them to request a demo and your lead nurturing is going to be maybe a lot of manual following up people.
And the sales conversion might be actually having a one on one meeting or meeting with a team of people at the enterprise to try and close that deal.
So in terms of understand the segment, you're going to fill out these boxes a little bit differently.
And, and I guess as you said is, you know, you talked about three different types of customers for your business.
Potentially you end up with three different one page marketing plans for each segment.
Right?

Allan Dib (31:35.580)
That's exactly right.
That's exactly right.
As you, as you add segments or as you add, you know, products in your business that are kind of completely different from your main product suite, then absolutely, you can do a one page marketing plan for each of your segments or you can do a one page marketing plan for each of your major products sections.
So yeah, that's exactly right.

Omer (31:56.190)
Great.
Okay, so let's move on to the last stage which you call after.
So somebody is a customer.
So again, can you kind of like give us a quick overview of the three steps in this stage and then sort of give us kind of deeper insights into each one of these?

Allan Dib (32:14.990)
Yeah.
So the after stage is when someone's become a customer, they've paid you their first dollar and this is the phase where the real money is actually made.
Like a lot of people finish their marketing or finish their sales and marketing when someone's become a paid customer.
But this is really the most important phase of them all.
And it's all about taking someone from just become, from becoming a transaction to becoming a raving fan and someone who refers you and becomes a net referrer.
So, and I'll, I'll go through what I mean by that.
So the first part of this stage is delivering a world class experience.
So you really want to wow people and you want to turn them into raving fans, people who are just wow, I can't believe how good this product is or how good the service is or how good the experience that I had is and take them through to becoming a real raving fan.
The next part of this is increasing the lifetime value of the customer.
And that's a very, very important metric, especially if you're in a SaaS business, is to understand what's the lifetime value of my customer.
And the reason that's important is because you want to first of all manipulate that number upwards.
But the other thing, it will tell you how much you can spend on acquiring a customer.
What's your cost of customer acquisition?
So if you, if you know over the lifetime a customer is worth $10,000 to you, then it's not going to be crazy to spend a thousand or two thousand or even five thousand dollars to win, win that customer over time.
So you need to know your numbers, especially in the SaaS business.
And then lastly is all about orchestrating and stimulating referrals.
And I purposely called it orchestrating and stimulating referrals because it implies something active.
Very often people sit and hope for referrals and they wait for referrals to come in, but it's actually a very active process and I outlined some of that in the last chapter of the book.
So that basically takes us through the after phase.
We turn someone from being just a transaction to a raving fan.
We increase their lifetime value and then we get them to orchestrate and stimulate referrals.

Omer (34:25.190)
Great.
So let's talk about the first step here.
Number seven, how do I deliver a world class experience?
So again, maybe it might be helpful just to share a couple of examples on how maybe people can think about delivering a world class experience.

Allan Dib (34:44.310)
Yep.
So I often say, you know, sell them what they want, but give them what they need.
Right.
So someone may be thinking that they need a CRM system and maybe they do, you know, if you're, if your SaaS is a CRM system, but often they also need something else.
So maybe they need, they need a way of systemizing their sales process or systemizing their marketing process or really understanding segmentation or whatever else.
So you need to go beyond just the tool or the tactic that you provide.
And another example I give is, you know, in the Fitness space.
Right.
So, you know, no one's going to sign up for a course or a personal trainer or whatever.
If, if you're offering something that just that they need, they're going to sign up for something that they want.
And an example of that is you're going to get six pack abs.
Right.
That's what people sign up for.
But they sign up for what they want, the six pack abs.
But then you need to give them what they need.
You need to give them their nutrition plan, you need to give them their exercise plan, you need to show them how to do push ups, pull ups, whatever else you're doing.
So you sell them what they need, but you give them what they want and that gives them a result.
And, and you know, so often I see where business owners say, you know what, I just sell this product and it's their problem as to how they use it, how they implement it, how they get it going.
And I say, no, it's your problem.
You need to make sure that they're getting the result that they want.
So you're not just in the business of selling them a tool or a piece of software or a piece of SaaS and then walking away and letting them struggle on getting a result.
You need to help them get the result that they wanted from that tool.

Omer (36:36.060)
Yeah.
And in, in terms of a SaaS business, this could be, you know, many SaaS companies will have somebody who's focused on customer success and really about making sure that even when somebody has entered their credit card information, it hasn't stopped there that you're actually actively figuring out how you can help these people achieve whatever result it is, whether it's the one they want or the one they really need, but helping them to get there.
And I think it also could be about delivering a better customer service.
It could be about, you know, how you're going to stand out from your competitors in terms of the quality of the service, the responsiveness or whatever it is that you're going to provide.
And I also just realized that how I deliver a world class experience is kind of.
There are a number of really important benefits here.
Firstly, by doing that, you're going to do a better job at retaining the customer.
And as most of us know, it costs a lot less to retain a customer than it does to find and nurture and acquire a new customer.
Secondly, it helps with the other two boxes in your plan because if you retain them, you're going to do a better job at increasing the customer lifetime value.
And if you do a Good job.
With world class experience, it's going to be also easier to get referrals because people will be more happy to do that for you.

Allan Dib (38:09.700)
Most definitely.
And it's all about creating that tribe of raving fans.
You know, almost seeing yourself as the mayor of your tribe and you know, I've seen that done very well with certain software companies.
Like I said, signed up for Wistia, which is just a video hosting service, right.
There's heaps of them, there's, there's free ones like YouTube, there's Vimeo.
So I signed up for Wistia.
But you know, and you think about what they do, it's really very highly technical.
It's all about just embedding videos and hosting and CDNs and all of that sort of thing.
But they really don't speak about that stuff very much.
A lot of their after marketing material, it's all about how do I create awesome looking videos, how do I do lighting, what camera do I need to create really good videos and all of that.
So they're really nurturing their tribe.
Even though I've already become a paying customer and it's all about just video hosting, they're now giving me examples on what cameras I should use, what lighting I should use, how to create an interesting video and all of that sort of stuff.
And that's valuable.
You know, they're really nurturing their tribe of clients.

Omer (39:16.530)
Yeah, and I totally agree.
I mean I've had Chris Savage, the CEO of Wistia on the show and I think that's the thing I mentioned.
He probably hears it all the time, but it was like, I love your videos.
It's like, you know, even, even if I wasn't using Wistia, as for video hosting, I love watching those videos because they're not only are they very educational, they're done in a very entertaining way which is quite unique.
Okay, great.
So we've got the world class experience, increasing customer lifetime value.
I guess that comes from what one is.
You can increase customer lifetime value by keeping that customer for longer, keeping that

Allan Dib (39:55.790)
customer longest, upselling them to the next plan, bundling some other services with them, possibly even collaborating with other people who are non competitive space but complementary.
So you know, if you're, if you've got real estate agents software and you know, your real estate agents are also going to need an accounting package, you can team up with someone who provides accounting packages and you can share some of the leads and share, you know, do some integrations where you know, the two become more valuable Than the sum, some of the parts.

Omer (40:30.260)
Yeah.
And a simple way of increasing customer lifetime value for a SaaS business might be switching somebody from a monthly subscription to an annual subscription.

Allan Dib (40:44.770)
Indeed.
Indeed.

Omer (40:46.210)
Okay, now the last section of the plan is how I orchestrate and stimulate referrals.
And you mentioned earlier that, you know, orchestrating for you implied that you actually have to do something.
It's an active thing.
So how, what are your suggestions on how to get referrals?
Because it's, it's not always the easiest thing for people to ask.

Allan Dib (41:10.940)
My first suggestion is to really think about the mindset of referrals and why people refer.
Because a lot of people feel uncomfortable about asking for referrals.
They feel like they're begging for business or putting pressure on their clients.
And that's really not what, what I'm about with this.
So if you go back and think about the last time you recommended a friend, a really good restaurant or really good movie to see or whatever, were you trying to do a favor to the movie chain or the restaurant or whatever?
No, you were trying to do a favor to your friend.
You had a great experience.
You wanted your friend to go have a great experience.
Right.
So if you've done the, if you've done the world class experience really well, someone's going to want to refer you.
Now you also want to arm them with some tools that will make it easy for them to refer you and will make them look good.
So for a SaaS business, something very logical would be, you know, hey, refer a friend and you get, you get your next monthly payment off and they get their free trial extended, or you, you give them a hundred dollar voucher and you get a hundred dollars off as well or whatever it is.
So making it, making the sharing process really easy and making the person who's doing the referring look good.
So, I mean, if I give my friend a $100 voucher to your SaaS product, and I know my friend's gonna need that SaaS product, I'm doing something really cool for my friend.
Right.
So I'm gonna look good with that.
So think of ways that you can help the person who's making the referral make it easy and make it, make them look good.

Omer (42:49.280)
Yeah, that's, that's a good way to think about it.
Great.
Is there anything else that we haven't kind of talked about here?

Allan Dib (43:00.510)
Look, I think that the general piece of advice I would give everyone is to really understand that the best marketer wins every time.
You know, I see it so often Someone will say, I've got the best product or I've got the best service or I've got the best SaaS in this industry or that industry or whatever.
And that's awesome.
That's a customer retention strategy.
You know, if you've got a really good product, that's, that's good for customer retention.
But before customer retention, you need customer acquisition.
You need a customer acquisition strategy.
And the reality is that the best marketer wins every time.
So I would ask people to reposition their thinking and rather than thinking you're in the SaaS business, start thinking that you're in the business of marketing a SaaS business.
So really understanding that different difference in mindset, that will be a huge turning point for you and your business.

Omer (43:53.800)
Yeah, that's awesome.
And, you know, I think the One Page Marketing plan is a great resource for doing that.
And, you know, the book is also called the One Page Marketing Plan, as it happens.
And so people can go and buy a copy of that at, at Amazon or their local bookshop.
I have both the Amazon, the Kindle version and the audio version of the book as well, so highly recommend it.
There you go.
A referral.
Just because I enjoy the book.

Allan Dib (44:29.590)
Thank you, Emma.

Omer (44:32.150)
And if people want to find out more about you, they can go to successwise.com and there they can also there's an opt in there where they can download the PDF version of the one page marketing plan template that they can use.
And if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Allan Dib (44:56.330)
Yeah, so just jump onto successwise.com you can hit the contact button and you can get through to me that way.
Or if you want to email me directly, it's just allanuccessweb.
I'd be happy to hear from your audience and answer any questions.

Omer (45:10.460)
Awesome.
Alan, thank you.
It's been a pleasure and I wish you all the best.

Allan Dib (45:17.180)
Thank you very much.

Omer (45:18.060)
Cheers.